IBM WebSphere Commerce-powered stores are about to get a heck of an upgrade.

As IBM releases its WebSphere Commerce V8.0 enhancements, merchandisers can expect a richer, easier experience for users on both sides of their online stores: marketers and buyers.

In a nutshell, the V8 release enables increased business agility, greater customer insights, and on-the-fly response to customer needs.

New Capabilities Highlights:

WebSphere Commerce’s Management Center is updated to use Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and the open source Spring Framework, making it much easier for developers to customize tools in Management Center.

The new user interface now supports Safari. The old version was Open Laszlo and utilized Flash, so it didn’t jive with Safari. That’s no longer the case.

Commerce Insights delivers business analytics in a single view, embedded with store pages, products and categories. From there, merchandisers can easily spot which products are selling well (or not), and take direct and immediate action (like editing product information right from the Insights screen).

Per IBM’s announcement, Commerce Insights will be delivered as a software as a service (SaaS) offering “that can be used with your on-premises or on-cloud deployment of IBM WebSphere Commerce V8.0.”

A new Customer Service functionality enables customer service reps to view exactly what customers see and perform key actions on behalf of the customer. This will be offered for both the Professional and Enterprise editions.

IBM has also simplified the migration process, providing multiple migration paths to V8 with the goal of eliminating downtime altogether.

As a reminder, here’s how the IBM WebSphere Commerce family of products breaks down:

IBM WebSphere Commerce V8 will be available on November 30. For a detailed description of the V8 release and capabilities, access IBM’s official announcement here (PDF version available). Meanwhile, stay tuned for more updates from our team here at BlueSky Technology Partners — a market leader in IBM Commerce solutions.